Current Giveaways:

Thursday, January 12, 2012

As a teenager, Emma Carlson Berne spent most her time reading Edith Wharton and Somerset Maugham. Occasionally, she would take a break for some Thomas Hardy. She was not voted prom queen. Emma grew up in Ohio in a house with a creepy little closet in the attic. She went to a small high school, made a lot of unfortunate fashion choices, and escaped to the University of Wisconsin as soon as possible. She now lives in Cincinnati, where she drinks quite a bit of coffee and sometimes writes.

STILL WATERS starts with a lie and the lying continues right through. I don’t want to give away too much, but at the beginning, the only way Hannah can leave town with Colin is by telling her mother a really big, complicated lie. Then she conceals the vacation destination from Colin—which isn’t exactly a lie, but is a deception. And then there’s the lie that. . .well, I don’t want to say any more but basically, the lies just keep on going, right until the end.

So, naturally, all of this got me thinking about lies in general, and the lies I’ve told in particular—especially to my parents.

I have two particularly bad lies—I have to preface this by saying that I was actually a pretty obedient kid and a fairly good teenager. My worst lie from childhood was this sort of weeks-long deception involving my report card. This would have been middle school, and I was horrified to have received a C- in math. I did not want my parents to see this, so I stuffed the report card into the back of my locker. I had no intention of showing it to my parents, ever. Then, to my dismay, I saw that the school had posted “Report Cards, 4/30” or some such, on the notice board outside the school—right off the street where my parents drove every day. I walked around in a cold sweat for about two weeks before my parents finally saw the sign, and asked me for the report card. Then I had to extract it, all crumpled, from the back of my locker. And of course, all the waiting, and the fall-out from the deception, was way worse than just showing it to them in the first place.

My second big lie is from when I was sixteen, and it’s a little more similar to Hannah’s. I’d been sort of seeing a guy who was like a full ten years older than me. In retrospect, I don’t know why a man of twenty-six was interested in a sixteen year-old (actually I do), but at the time, it seemed not at all creepy, just really, really exciting. So, my parents found out and I was expressly forbidden to see him—huge blow-out fight involving screaming and slamming car doors—and so after this, I lied, just flat-out lied to my mother when this guy wanted me to drive to a city three hours away with him one day. I did it, and I can’t even remember where I told her I was going, but I sure as hell didn’t tell her I’d be three hours away with this guy for the whole day.

Summary: Hannah can't wait to sneak off for a romantic weekend with her boyfriend, Colin. He’s leaving for college soon, and Hannah wants their trip to the lake house to be one they’ll never forget. But once Hannah and Colin get there, things start to seem a bit...off. They can't find the town on any map. The house they are staying in looks as if someone's been living there, even though it's been deserted for years. And Colin doesn’t seem quite himself. As he grows more unstable, Hannah worries about Colin’s dark side, and her own safety. Nothing is as perfect as it seems, and what lies beneath may haunt her forever.